


Everything changes; nothing does

by De_Nugis



Series: Renovation [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-30
Updated: 2011-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-24 04:18:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/258925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>built-in bookshelves, volunteer firefighting, stupid sex noises</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything changes; nothing does

**Author's Note:**

> Written for obstinatrix, who wanted fireman!Dean for the Fall Fandom Free-For_All.
> 
> Set in the Renovation 'verse, maybe a year to two years after Renovation II.
> 
> Title from James Merrill, "After the Fire."

Dean gets into it entirely by accident. He's in Dr. Nugent’s study, armed with square ruler and level, charting out just how fucked he is. She wants built-in bookshelves all round, like he put in at home when Sam first set up his business. Except this is a little more daunting. Dr. Nugent is pushing sixty, plump and a bit formal and five foot two or so, and somehow she looms over Dean better than Sammy ever has, even the T1000 version.

Her house is a beauty. Dean catches himself trailing his fingers along the worn, silky wood of the banister as he goes up and down the stairs, the way he sometimes brushes over the Impala’s hood. It’s a beauty, but it’s two hundred years old and there’s not a right angle in the place. The floors dip and fall in shallow waves, the walls buckle and bulge and narrow gently towards the ceilings, and the lines of the window frames slant casually this way and that. Dean’s going to go crazy if he tries for straight, clean lines, and it will just look like a mess.

He’s sketching out something, shelves climbing the walls like steps, different shaped interlocking boxes, when the smoke detector screams downstairs. He’s taking the steps three at a time, brain checking off Sam, safe, four miles away, before he registers that he’s dropped his pencil or gotten up from the floor.

Smoke is pouring out of the kitchen, dense and smelly. Dean ducks low and peers in. There’s a frying pan on the stove sputtering with flames, a few smoldering spatters already on counter and floor. Dr. Nugent is doubled over coughing, blundering in the wrong direction. Dean pulls his shirt up over his mouth and darts in, gets a hold of her and hauls her to the front door, pushes her out, slaps his cell into her hand.

“Call 911, just in case,” he says, and heads back. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall. He wets a towel, slaps it round his face, grabs the red fire extinguisher from the hallway. The fire’s spreading, but it’s no raging inferno. He pulls the pin on the fire extinguisher and sprays white chemical goop over the flames. The smell gets ten times worse, but the fire dies.

“Mr. Winchester?” calls Dr. Nugent’s voice from the hall, a bit hoarse.

“Here,” calls Dean. “It’s OK, fire’s out.”

“That was very efficient of you,” she says. “But you don’t have to consider it your duty as carpenter to go down with my house, you know. I’ll be with you in a moment. I’m just calling back to say we don’t need fire trucks.”

He hears her talking, and a moment later she’s at his shoulder, handing him back his phone.

“Well,” she says, calmly surveying the wreckage. “That would have been an unfortunate start to a sabbatical. Thank you, Mr. Winchester. It seems I can’t offer you BLTs after all. Perhaps you would let me buy you lunch and a beer instead, and we can talk about shelves.”

The woman is scary.

 

Dean’s honestly almost forgotten the incident by the time he gets home. But when Sam comes downstairs, runs his hands over Dean’s shoulders and leans in to nuzzle at his ear – he still defaults to silence a lot of the time, usually takes half an hour or so after they’ve been apart to warm up to talking – he draws back sharply, then shoves Dean up against the wall and starts unbuttoning his shirt with shaking fingers. For a moment Dean wonders if he’s done something irresistibly sexy to his hair today or something, but Sam isn’t gearing up for wall sex. Instead he pulls Dean’s shirt off and turns him slowly round, 360 degrees, grabs his arms and moves them this way and that, surveying every inch of skin.

When he starts in on Dean’s belt, Dean figures it’s time to intervene.

“What the fuck, Sam?” he says.

Sam leans in again, nostrils flaring, and smells his hair.

“Dude,” says Dean, “Creepy.”

Sam’s breathing deeply, eyes closed, the way he does when he’s trying to get a hold on himself, work his way back to words. Finally he looks around and steps back, touches Dean’s shoulder in apology.

“You smelled of smoke,” he says.

Oh, that. “Dr. Nugent had a bit of a fire in her kitchen when I was over there seeing about those shelves,” says Dean. “Just bacon gone wrong, but it did stink to high heaven.”

Apparently Sam isn’t buying the casual thing. His eyes widen and his hands fasten back on Dean’s shoulders, shaking him. Dean tries a soothing pat on Sam’s chest.

“Hey, whoa, it’s all right, no one was hurt. I’m not hurt. I got Dr. Nugent out and went back and dealt with the fire. Used a fire extinguisher and everything. Makes a nice change, given our lives, huh? The kitchen was hardly even damaged.”

The last thing he’s expecting is for Sam to haul back and punch him in the face. Not hard, they give and take far worse, sparring, but it stings.

“Ow,” says Dean.

“You went back in? Fuck, Dean. You stupid fuck,”

“I like her house,” says Dean. “I didn’t want it to burn down. Not when I’m about to build bookcases for it.”

“You don’t get to do that, Dean. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to die, not now, for a stupid house.”

“Sam,” says Dean. “Dude. I’m fine. It hadn’t spread. She had an extinguisher.”

“You can’t do that again,” says Sam. He leaves Dean propped against the wall, doesn’t open his mouth the rest of the evening.

 

Dean’s at Dr. Nugent’s again next Monday, marking up the walls, figuring how much of what wood he needs, when someone taps on the doorframe. He turns round expecting to see Dr. Nugent, but it’s a tall woman with short grey hair and crow’s feet in a tanned face. Dr. Nugent’s partner. He can’t remember her name. Margaret Prince? Price?

Dean’s seen her around, but she hasn’t been in before when he’s been at the house, and he’s never talked to her. She does forestry or something like that, something environmental Sam approves of. She’d given a nature talk at the town library about a month back on dragonflies. Sam had talked about going, even picked up the car keys to head out, but he’d stopped in the doorway like he’d bounced off a forcefield, turned back inside and clammed up for two days. _Not as hot as yesterday_ to Mrs. Kendal at the general store is still about as far as he’s got, conversing with new people.

“Mr. Winchester,” Margaret Whatever says.

“Dean,” Dean corrects, and holds out his hand. He can’t cope with another person in this house Mr. Winchestering him. She grins, takes his hand in a brief, firm, calloused grip.

“Margaret,” she says. “You and your brother live out in that place by the pond, don’t you? Nice that someone bought it and fixed it up at last.” She looks around at Dean’s markings on the walls and grins again. “Bit of a carpentry challenge, isn’t it? Emily has too many damn books. Now she’s talking about retiring up here full time in a few years. That’s an apartment and an office worth more of the things. We may need to hire you to build us a second house.”

“My brother’s the same,” says Dean. “Well, it’s his job, of course. But I think he only puts up with the selling so he gets to do the hoarding. Me, I like to _read_ books. He likes to count serifs or some shit like that.” Dean wonders, sometimes, if it’s another leftover from Sam’s year and a half without words, this thing he’s developed for paper and bindings and tiny nicks in printed letters. Like he needs tangible, wordless contact, even with books.

Margaret laughs. Then her face goes serious. “Listen, Dean,” she says, “I’ll get out of your hair and let you get back to work. But I wanted to say thank you. For the fire thing the other day. And I wanted to ask you something.”

“Sure,” says Dean.

“You know we run on a volunteer fire department here? I’ve been doing the forest fire prevention and training stuff for years. Jim Kendal’s the captain. We could use new people. You seem like you know what you’re doing, like you’re good in an emergency. If you think you might be interested, maybe give him a call, or drop by the store and have a chat about it. They do training and supply the equipment and everything, and it’s not like you’re running into burning buildings every night. Serious fires almost never happen. But it’s good to know we’ve got neighbors we can count on when they do.”

“Badass fireman? I could maybe do that,” says Dean. He rubs at the back of his neck. The running into burning buildings he can do, certainly. It’s the _neighbor_ part’s weirding him out. And Sam. Shit. After his freakout last week could be this is the worst thing in the world to propose to Sam. “I mean, thank you for asking. But I’ll have to think about it. Got to talk to Sam.”

“Of course,” says Margaret. “Take your time. Talk to Jim. Talk to your brother. But we’d like to have you.” She heads off downstairs.

Dean stops by the store on the way home. Jim Kendal’s got a xeroxed pamphlet. Dean’s sitting on the couch reading it when Sam comes in from one of his nature hikes, muddy and twiggy. He flops down on the couch and Dean starts pulling the twigs out of his hair. Sam’s eyes fall on the pamphlet. Dean passes it over.

“Don’t freak out and yell at me,” he says.

Sam reads it through carefully, in silence. Then he reads it again, folds it up and hands it back.

“You want this,” he says. “Jesus, I thought _I_ was the addict.”

“It’s not like that. I don’t want to go back. I want to be here. This is about living here. But if you don’t want me to do it I won’t. I mean, I get that it might be a problem.” Sam has barely said five words about hell since he got back to talking, but one of them was _fire_. “You want me to say no?”

“No,” says Sam. No hesitation, no fumbling his way out of silence, no touching Dean. “No. If this is really something you want, if you need some outlet for your fucking hero thing, I want you to do it this way. I want you to have the training and the rules and schedules and protective gear. I want you to have people around you who aren’t on any suicide mission, who know it’s stupid, that it’s fucking wrong, to throw yourself into the flames because you’ve got a deathwish and you like somebody’s goddamn house. I want you out there with someone whose orders you have to follow when they tell you it’s time to get out.” Sam’s shaking, his voice low and vicious.

“Wow, Sam. Way to be a controlling asshole about this. I told you, I don’t have to do it if you don’t like it.”

“You know what, Dean? I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m being an asshole. I want you alive. I’ve fucking earned having you alive. And you want to do this, you’ve got to make me a promise.”

“What?” says Dean shortly.

Now Sam touches him, grabbing his forearm. “I know you’ve got to save people. I know you can’t not. You carried me out of the fire twice. You hauled me out of the cage. You can’t stop being that person. So, OK. This way you get to have that. But you’ve got to promise you’re not going to be the guy who goes back in for the dog. You know. The moron who burns because some little girl’s crying that Rover’s still in there.”

Dean really has no idea sometimes why Sam’s brain goes the places it goes.

“I’m not going to die to save a dog, Sam. Christ. I don’t even like dogs. Especially not that yappy thing of the Suttons. If that is a dog. I think it’s more some kind of mutant long-haired rat.”

Sam lets go of Dean’s arm. He doesn’t smile.

“OK,” he says.

Dean stands up.

“This is all a fuss about nothing,” he says. “Town this size, how many fires do we even have? I’m more likely to die of, like, killer leeches from the pond.”

“Or an eagle dropping a turtle on your head.”

“What?” says Dean.

“It happened to Aeschylus,” says Sam. “I’ll make dinner.” He stalks off into the kitchen. Dean can hear the cupboard door open and close, a jar set down on the counter.

“Do you want me to promise not to walk under any eagles?” he yells. Sam doesn’t answer.

 

The training is pretty intense, actually. It’s weird. Not at all like being back in Dad’s secret boot camp, _Never tell anyone, son, never tell them what we do, what’s out there. They’ll take you away. They’ll take Sammy away._ It’s weird to be talking about fire with civilians, to flash back to that searing glimpse of Mom, to Sam with Jess’s blood on his face, fighting Dean as he dragged him out. Fire used to be private, family. It’s a public thing here. Dangerous, but it doesn’t have it in for anyone in particular. And Dean’s surprised by how much he enjoys the whole system of it, the planning, the apparatus. Getting to know the gear and the rigs. Hell, he’s always wanted to drive a fire truck.

They have a kind of induction/graduation at the end, for him and Enrique, the other new recruit. Sam comes to it. He slips in late, stands in the back, slips out before he’d have to talk to anyone, but his eyes are on Dean the whole time Dean’s up there. Dean only stays for one round at the bar afterwards. He picks up a six pack and heads home.

Sam’s willing to be dragged off to drink outside, even if it’s October and getting chilly. They sit on the hood of the car, though they have two perfectly good deck chairs. Sam’s shoulder is warm against Dean’s. Silence settles around them, under the dull chink of bottles. Easy silence, from way back before either hell.

“Sorry,” says Sam eventually.

“That a _still not letting go of the apocalypse thing_ sorry, or a _took the last beer_ sorry?”

“It’s an _I was an asshole about the fireman business_ sorry.”

Dean shifts uncomfortably.

“It still freaks me out,” Sam goes on quietly. “But it fits you. It’s good for you. So I’m sorry I was an asshole. Just, no dogs. Or cats or parakeets or anything.”

“Dude, this whole saving pets thing is just in your head,” says Dean. He knocks his shoe against Sam’s. Sam kicks back. His leg tangles with Dean’s. He turns so his breath is beery and warm on Dean’s face, but doesn’t kiss him. Dean gets his hand up under the heavy hair at the nape of Sam’s neck. It’s nice and warm. It’s really too cold to be drinking beer outside with no gloves. They should go in.

“It’s not a deathwish,” he says, “Or a danger wish or some messed up hero thing. I mean, I. That day at Dr. Nugent’s. It’s a nice house, you know? Old. Been there two hundred years. And I got some stake in it, working on it. This whole place, Sam, the town, the house, your book stuff, everything. I keep it standing, I get to live in it. We get to live in it.” Sam gets to live in it. He got fucked up in the pit saving the world. He should have it to live in.

Sam doesn’t say anything, just rolls over onto Dean, rests his forehead against his. Nudges their noses together, works Dean’s mouth open with his lips. His hands come up and cover Dean’s chilly ears. Dean’s warm all over now.

 

So it settles into routine. Dean’s on call two nights a week at home, one night at the station. He goes out to a couple of accident scenes, lays down foam, and nothing catches fire. A bonfire gets out of control. The way Margaret tells the kids off – stupid drunk teenagers – Dean doubts they’ll be so much as lighting a match for a decade. He helps out with fire drills at the school.

Only one thing burns to the ground, that whole first year, the Hansons’ garage. It’s a hot, fast fire. By the time the tanker gets there it’s more about making sure it doesn’t spread to the house than doing anything for the poor old Ford truck perishing within. Dean plays out the hose next to Jim, heat beating at him even through the heavy coat and mask. He can’t hear a thing over the noise of the flames. He grins to himself. Can’t think of a hunt where he ever stood this far back from danger or had two big trucks of backup. Sam should be proud of him. Not a crying little girl or endangered dog to be seen.

It’s past four in the morning when Dean gets home. Sam’s waiting up, of course. At least he lets Dean shower off the smoke and sweat and the stink of chemicals before he bends him over the bed, fucks him all quiet and efficient. He falls asleep afterwards wrapped around Dean like kudzu, but he doesn’t wake up silent the next day.

 

The department’s annual fundraising fair and dinner comes round not long after. Sam donates a few boxes of paperbacks to the bookstall, but stays away from the fair. Dean’s not really expecting him to show up for the dinner, but he does. First part of the evening he sticks to Dean like antisocial velcro, but by the time people are scattering to the bar after eating he’s drifted off. Dean catches his voice through the crowd, and hears Margaret laughing.

“I was talking to Dr Nugent,” says Sam later that night, breath damp against the hickey he’s just sucked right below Dean’s jaw.

“That’s nice, Sam,” says Dean, tilting his head further in case Sam wants to start in on hickey number two. “I’m glad you’re making friends and talking about them while we’re having sex.” And the sad thing is, he is.

“She’s an interesting person,” says Sam. “She’s writing an article about antiquarians and antiquarianism in a couple of minor Victorian novels.” Now the pervy bastard is accompanying his lady professor dirty talk by working over Dean’s nipples, pinching them to hardness and twisting them in painful little half circles that have Dean gasping and groping down towards Sam’s cock.

“You and scary women, Sam. I swear to God.”

“Oh, like you’re not her favorite. I think she writes poems to your built-in bookshelves.”

“That’s because my built-in shelves are awesome.”

“Yeah, they kind of are,” says Sam. His face has that fond, proud look Dean never knows what to do with, so he gets his hand around Sam’s dick and starts to jack him firmly. Sam’s eyes go heavy-lidded and he thrusts up against Dean’s hand, fingers digging into Dean’s shoulders. “She even showed me -- fuck, Dean – pictures.”

“What?” says Dean. His conversational powers decline when he’s got Sam’s dick in his hand, hot and thick and slick with precome, Sam’s hips thrusting into his grip in little, helpless jerks, Sam’s chest all flushed and heaving beside him. “What pictures?”

Sam’s panting now, and spilling those ridiculous little high-pitched “ahs!” that make Dean wonder if he’d purposely scheduled their first couple months of sex in his mute period to postpone Dean finding out how stupid his sex sounds are. “What pictures?” he asks again, because it’s fun to watch Sam stick doggedly to a train of thought while simultaneously working his way to an orgasm.

“Pictures – ah! – of her study, with the bookshelves. She has them on her phone. Fuck, yeah, like that. They’re cool. That asymmetrical thing, and the light and dark woods, and the corner . . . ah! ah! ah!” Seriously, it’s hard to keep a straight face around Sam when he does that. Dean ducks his head against Sam’s sweaty neck to hide his smile.

“You gonna come talking about my built-in bookshelves?” he asks against warm skin. “Bout how I had to drive those drywall screws into the wall studs, big fucking screws, Sam, those were some heavy shelves, solid hardwood? Took a lot of care with the sanding, too. Rubbing over and over, really putting my shoulder into it, and that was August, no a/c, I was dripping sweat, yeah, there you go, Sammy.” Sam’s hands clutch painfully tight, his hips stutter, and hot come spills over Dean’s hand and spatters Sam’s belly. He slumps back against the bed with a last, long drawn “Uhhhhhhhh,” that sounds like a dying bullfrog. Dean strokes him through the aftershocks, starts smearing come down towards his hole. His turn. Sam lets his legs fall slackly open.

This is one of Dean’s favorite kinds of sex, no hurry, Sam blissed out and relaxed, letting go of his amazing, exhausting drive for a bit. Maybe he’ll come again, maybe he won’t, but he loves being fucked like this, and he’s working his toes against the bed like a cat while Dean takes his time, supplementing come with lube, humming a little, like he does when he’s deep in a job, the tug of desire steady and uninsistent. By the time Dean’s up to two fingers Sam’s most of the way back, lifting his head from the pillow to watch Dean’s movements, eyes starting to heat and dick beginning to harden again. Dean drops a kiss on the inside of his thigh, rubs his stubble over the soft skin there till it reddens, refuses to pick up his pace.

“So what did you talk about?” he asks.

“Hmmm?” says Sam.

“You and Dr. Nugent. Or did you spend the whole conversation on your dirty shared fetish with my bookshelves?”

“Oh,” says Sam. He props himself on his forearms, looking serious and tentative. “She . . . there’s an exhibit. On the Bannatyne Club, it was this antiquarian thing in Edinburgh. They did a lot of editions of medieval texts, some really interesting early facsimile techniques. And they’re having this exhibit at the Beinecke, at Yale. There’s a conference in a couple of weeks, when it opens. She thought I might like to go.”

Oh. Dean keeps his fingers moving steadily. Three, now. Sam pushes against him, urging him deeper.

“You want to?” Dean asks. Yeah, Sam’s started having actual conversations with people who aren’t Dean, and he hasn’t gone silent at home, one of those relapses that last for days, in months, but it’s a long way from that to driving off to mingle with a bunch of strangers.

Sam lets out an embarrassed half laugh and flops back against the pillow.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I kind of do. It’s just a weekend. A day, really, the whole conference is on Saturday. If I don’t want to talk to anyone I can sit in back and listen to the papers, and if I don’t want to do that I can just lurk and look at the books. But it might be good, you know?”

Dean pulls his fingers out and scootches up over Sam, bracketing his face with his hands. Sam grins, nervous and giddy. Wanting to go to scenic New Haven, hang out in a strong contender for America’s most depressing city and talk to book nerds about early facsimile techniques. They’d better at least have a reception and feed Sam free booze and those little sausage rolls.

“You can borrow my car,” says Dean. He kisses his way along the hairline at Sam’s temple, across his eyelids. Down to the corner of his jaw and the pulse point on his throat. Sam arches his head back, slides his hands down Dean’s back to his ass. Wraps his legs round Dean and cants his hips so Dean can start to push in.

 

Part of Dean is expecting that this conference will be the dragonfly talk all over again, that Sam will freeze halfway through opening the car door, or turn round and come driving back Saturday morning. But he heads out on schedule, only the slight jerkiness as he backs the Impala betraying that this is a big deal. And when Dean calls him Saturday night, an end of shift check-in to certify he still hasn’t sacrificed himself to save the Suttons’ psycho terrier, Sam gives him a stultifying lecture on the history of lithography.

 

Dean’s setting up a bird feeder when Sam gets back. Margaret gave it to him, something between a thank you for his first year in the department and a hint, Dean suspects. Like maybe if he develops an unnatural passion for finches he’ll start getting all his lumber from her favorite supports-sustainable-logging mill.

Sam gets out of the car and comes up behind him.

“A birdfeeder, Dean? Really?”

“You can see it from the kitchen window,” says Dean. “I want to keep you happy while you’re cooking my dinners.”

Sam gives a slow, skeptical smile.

“It was a present from Margaret, OK?” says Dean. “Be glad it’s not a dragonfly feeder.”

“Dragonflies are predators,” says Sam. “They hunt other insects.”

“Your nature lore is one of your least charming qualities. How was the conference?”

“It was good,” says Sam, and he sounds like he means it. “Met a couple of other dealers, and some collectors. And a lot of professors and grad students. Those people are scary around food.” He drops into one of the deck chairs. Dean comes and sits in the other, keeping an eye on the feeder in case exotic birds show for their sunflower granola stuff. He keeps the other eye on Sam. Sam stretches out his legs luxuriously and looks around at the house and garden and the decaying dock on their little inlet of the pond. They should repair it. Maybe next summer. Any fire tries to take any of this away, Dean’s going to kick its ass, and the whole department's standing by to help him.

“It’s good to be home,” Sam says.


End file.
